The Man from Toronto (Hill); The Good Companions (Saville); Soldiers of the King (The Woman in Command) (Elvey); King of the Ritz (Gallone); The Lucky Number (Asquith); Sleeping Car (Litvak); It's a Boy (Whelan); Falling for You (Hulbert); Britannia of Billingsgate (Hill); Orders Is Orders (Forde); The Ghoul (Hunter); I Was a Spy (Saville); The Fire Raisers (Powell); Just Smith (Walls); Friday the Thirteenth (Saville); Aunt Sally (Along Came Sally) (Whelan); The Constant Nymph (Dean); Turkey Time (Walls)

San Demetrio London (Frend); The Halfway House (Dearden); For Those in Peril (Crichton); The Return of the Vikings (Frend); They Came to a City (Dearden); Champagne Charlie (Cavalcanti); Fiddlers Three (Watt)

Sedgwick, John, "Michael Balcon's Close Encounter with the American Market, 1934–36," in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, August 1996.

Moat, Janet, "The Aileen and Michael Balcon Special Collection: an Introduction to British Cinema History," in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, October 1996.

Kemp, Philip, "Paradise Postponed: Ealing, Rank and They Came to a City," in Cineaste (New York), Fall 1998.

* * *

Of the three producers whose influence, above all, shaped the British cinema—Alexander Korda, J. Arthur Rank and Michael Balcon—it was Balcon that in the end proved the strongest and the most lasting. Though he never enjoyed Korda's international prestige, nor Rank's financial might, he succeeded in creating a body of films recognizably stamped with his own image. To speak of a Denham film, or a Pinewood film, conveys no particular idea—but "an Ealing film" suggests, for better or worse, a very specific and very British style of movie, strongly marked by the personality of Balcon himself. Many of the outstanding qualities of British cinema, both during his lifetime and since, can be credited to Michael Balcon. And so, perhaps, can some of its faults.

Balcon's influence on British cinema long pre-dates his arrival at Ealing in 1938. He produced his first feature film in 1923 at Islington Studios, where he founded Gainsborough Pictures and gave Alfred Hitchcock his first chance to direct. As head of Gaumont-British in the 1930s he produced some of the most successful British films of the period: not only Hitchcock's thrillers, but Jessie Matthews musicals, Ben Travers farces, and the comedies of Jack Hulbert and Will Hay. There was also a string of slightly ungainly Anglo-German co-productions—and the occasional excursion into high seriousness such as Flaherty's Man of Aran, otherwise known as "Balcon's Folly."

After a brief, unhappy stint heading MGM's UK operation, Balcon took over from Basil Dean at Ealing, where he created the nearest the British film industry ever came to a studio after the classic Hollywood pattern. Like, say, Warners in the 1930s, Ealing had its roster of personnel—directors, writers, technicians, and so forth—on permanent salary, its pool of actors, its recurrent thematic preoccupations and, derived from all these, a recognizable house-style of filmmaking.

During this, "the happiest and most rewarding period of my working life," Balcon was able to realise his ambition of an indigenous, independent, national cinema, modest in its resources but international in scope. His aim, like that of every major British producer, was to get into the American market, but without aping the values, and the "hard technical perfection," of Hollywood movies. "We shall become international," he insisted, "by being national." To the "tinsel" of Hollywood he opposed the "realism" of Ealing—documentary-based productions, in authentic settings. Documentary, he contended, was less a question of factual, non-fiction subjects than of "an attitude of mind towards filmmaking."

Throughout his career Balcon was a great nurturer of young talent. At Ealing, presiding benevolently over "Mr Balcon's Academy for Young Gentlemen" (in Monja Danischewsky's famous phrase), he fostered a whole generation of filmmakers—not just directors like Alexander Mackendrick, Robert Hamer, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Seth Holt, but producers, writers, cinematographers and actors—allowing them to develop their skills within an exceptionally tolerant and supportive atmosphere. He was, as Mackendrick remarked, "very mean with money, but extraordinarily generous with opportunities."

Inevitably, this benign environment had its drawbacks. Under Balcon's guidance, Ealing encouraged a consensus mentality that verged on complacency, a weakness for eccentricity dangerously akin to whimsy. Staunchly patriotic, he set out to make films "reflecting Britain and the British character," but it was a reflection contained within a carefully defined frame. Certain subjects—notably sex and religion—alarmed him, and featured rarely, if at all. Social institutions could be gently mocked, but never seriously attacked. Those directors—Hamer, Mackendrick, Cavalcanti—who expressed a darker vision did so only by defying, or subverting, the studio ethos.

Balcon has been accused of insularity, of turning his back on cinematic developments elsewhere—in Bertrand Tavernier's words, "a totally British talent but closed to the rest of the world." Certainly, Ealing never encouraged formal experimentation, and it's hard to imagine the swirling Baroque fantasies of Michael Powell fitting in there. In its latter years the studio retreated into a dated, toytown concept of England, and after its demise Balcon himself seemed a diminished figure, presiding uneasily at Bryanston over the brash outspokenness of the British New Wave.

Balcon's limitations, though, were the obverse of his strengths. And it is for his strengths that he was remarkable—for his vigorous, indefatigable championship of British filmmaking, for his skill in reconciling commercial appeal with creative integrity, for his knack of spotting, cultivating and teaming disparate talents. If his concept of cinema sometimes seemed unambitious, it was also—like the man himself—refreshingly free from pretension or rhetoric. It was typical of him that, looking back on his career, he assigned to others the credit for his achievement. "A film producer is only as good as the sum total of the quality of the colleagues with whom he works, and in this respect I have been uniquely fortunate."

—Philip Kemp

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